Chương 20

Inside the courtyard of Grey Garden, the afternoon had turned grey. Clouds had rolled in from the sea, thick and low, casting the castle in a dim pallor that made the bloodstains on the cobbles look black instead of red. Sitting on a weathered crate near the gatehouse, Galad waited while Mors worked at the straps of his armor, retying knots that had come loose during the fighting. The young man-at-arms worked in silence, fingers deft despite their trembling. Sweat darkened his hair beneath his helm.

Around them, men moved through the captured courtyard in small groups, checking bodies, tending wounds, securing the few Ironborn who had not managed to make it to the keep when the walls fell. The air smelled of blood and death and the sea wind that pushed through the open gates. Footsteps approached across the stones. Galad did not need to look up to know who it was.

"I heard you arranged for a duel with the Harlaw knight, Ser Galad." Ser Owen Inchfield's voice carried across the yard. Behind him came three of his knights, their armor clean and unmarked, fresh men who had not climbed the walls or fought in the gatehouse.

"That will not come to pass. The enemy is exhausted and outnumbered while we still have fresh men. We shall storm the keep at once, or put it to fire if needs be." Pulling the final knot tight on the greave, Mors stepped back. Galad rose from the crate, movements measured and smooth despite the hour of fighting that had come before. Deep in the void, his body felt distant, a thing he inhabited rather than something that belonged to him. He began checking his armor himself, testing each piece. Chestpiece secure.

Pauldrons properly seated. Vambrace straps firm. Greaves snug against his shins.

"No," he said. The word fell into the space between them like a stone into still water.

"No?" Owen's brow knitted together. Taking a step closer, he jabbed a finger toward Galad.

"Do you think me a fool, woodsman? That I cannot see your aim here? To supplant me as commander? To take credit for this victory?" His voice grew harsher as he spoke, rising until he was nearly growling.

"To unman me in front of the men?" The man's words washed over Galad like a trickle of water breaking against a boulder, completely without power to disturb. He did not lift his gaze from his armor, checking the buckles at his sword belt, ensuring the blade moved freely in its scabbard.

"It bothers me naught what you think my goals are, Ser Owen," Galad said, his tone empty of inflection.

"You have tasked me to take the castle and I shall see it through. That is all."

"Then I am rescinding that command." Shaking his head, Galad finally looked up.

"I have already given Ser Harras my word. I shall not go back on it."

"Your word?" The contempt in the man's voice was genuine, at least.

"You think I care—" Moving forward as he spoke, Owen made to step into Galad's space, to use his height and bulk to intimidate. Only for Galad to turn fully toward him, meeting his eyes with a gaze that held nothing. No anger. No fear. No concern at all. The man stopped cold, words cutting short. Their gazes locked. Whatever Owen Inchfield saw in those violet eyes made his throat bob, made him glance back at the knights who had followed him.

The three large men in their polished steel had not moved when Owen stepped forward. If anything, the biggest one—a bear of a man with a scar across his chin—had taken a step back. Grinding his teeth together, Owen drew himself up to his full height.

"Do you think I'm afraid of you?" The words came out in a hiss.

"If I ordered you seized right now, the men would obey me. They would. I am their commander." Looking deep into the man's eyes, Galad saw the threat for what it was. Empty. He knew this type well enough. They had filled the halls of Caemlyn and Tar Valon both. Deep inside, beneath the bluster and the title and the fine armor, Owen Inchfield was a coward. A bully, used to getting what he wanted by throwing the weight of his name around, or his connections, or his martial skill against lesser men.

Nothing that worried Galad overmuch.

"If," he said, and turned away.

"This is treason." Owen's voice rose behind him, cracking slightly on the word.

"Lord Mace will hear of this, do you hear me? I will have you hanged for this!" But Galad was already walking toward the center of the courtyard. His boots struck the cobbles in even rhythm, the void keeping his stride steady and smooth. The men who had taken the walls and the gatehouse and the chain room with him, along with those that had come in through the gates later, had gathered in a rough half-circle there, and when they saw him coming they opened a gap and let him through.

Hands found his pauldrons and his back, and voices called out his name and wished him well. Same as Owen's hollow threats, the words did not move Galad. Could not. Neither one could reach him now. The void held everything at arm's length—the pride and the fear and the good wishes and the hollow menace alike, all of them simply weather, simply the world going on around him while he stood at the center of it Only the here and now mattered. Only the cobbles beneath his feet. Only the sword at his side.

Only the man stalking up from the other side of the yard. Ser Harras Harlaw emerged from the keep's entrance flanked by dozens of Ironborn warriors, armed men who had refused to yield when the walls fell. They moved into the yard and spread around the opposite edge of the half-circle the Reachmen had made, filling it in until the ring was complete and the two knights stood alone in the middle of it, facing each other across a stretch of old grey stone. Overhead, the clouds pressed lower.

The light had gone flat and grey, turning the world into something without shadow or depth. Galad could hear every creak of armor as the crowd of men shifted in place, every sigh and every breath and every prayer and curse.

"Ser Galad of Dunstonbury." Harras' voice carried across the stones. The man stood easily despite the situation, shoulders relaxed beneath his half-plate.

"You have made it clear what shall happen if you win. The castle will yield to you, you have my word. But tell me, what is it I can expect when I win?" The man spoke as if winning were a foregone conclusion. In the void, Galad felt no insult at the presumption.

"Should you win, the men here will honor my last wishes. They will vacate the castle in good order, and you will live to fight another day. Whether that be later this night or when another force of Reachmen comes to your walls, I could not say."

"Piss poor rewards you offer, ser." A note of grim humor entered Harras' tone.

"It is the only ones you'll have." He sniffed once.

"So be it." Cracking his neck to one side, the Knight of Grey Garden settled his feet on the cobbles.

"To the death, then?"

"Will you yield if it comes to it?" Galad asked. A smirk appeared on the knight's face beneath his half-helm, visible through the open visor.

"Never." Galad nodded once. He was not so proud as to refuse yielding in the face of a superior opponent, but it would not come to that. Instead, Ser Harras took his nod as confirmation that he, too, would never yield. Reaching to his side, the Ironborn knight drew his blade. Nightfall sang as it left its scabbard, a thin sound that stretched across the yard and echoed off the castle walls.

A hush fell through the crowd as the famed Valyrian steel longsword of House Harlaw came into the open, with hundreds of men pressing closer to glimpse the legendary blade. Seeing it now in the grey afternoon light, Galad had to admit it was a beautiful weapon. Dark steel rippled with silver-like patterns that caught what little light remained, the metal seeming to flow like water frozen in place.

A large moonstone sat in its pommel, brilliant and white as the full moon on a cloudless night, throwing back reflections that danced across Harras' armor. Galad had never wielded a power-wrought blade in his past life, though he had seen them carried by Blademasters and kings. Still, none had looked as remarkable as the weapon before him now. His own sword leapt from its sheath, the sound harsh and ordinary by comparison. The blade was solid enough, well-made by some castle smith, but it paled beside dragonsteel.

Still, its weight felt right in his hand, the grip worn to the exact shape of his palm from years of daily use. He had brought a shield to the duel, had it strapped to his left arm, but seeing Ser Harras approach without one, he let his own fall from his grip and heard it ring against the cobbles. Across from him, Harras shook his head slightly, as if thinking him a fool for trying to be fair. In truth, it would only make the duel shorter.

Galad was more accustomed to fighting without the shield than with it, and the extra freedom was worth more to him than the protection. Ser Harras closed the distance between them, his steps confident and relaxed in a way that reminded Galad of Eamon Valda's arrogant saunter before their duel in another life.

Cat Crosses the Courtyard, the movement was called, more a way to move and carry oneself than a true sword form, meant to project assurance and control, to tell an opponent what you were before the swords had even met. At least then, Valda had been a Blademaster, and the form had its uses beyond the affectation of self-assurance. Here, it only showed Ser Harras' hubris. And, as with many men before him, hubris would precede his downfall.

Harras closed the last two steps at a dash, without warning, and Nightfall flashed up and across in a precise diagonal arc aimed at the thin gap between pauldron and chestpiece. If it found its mark, any other sword would simply slash against the mail beneath, but Galad had heard the stories. Valyrian steel would shear through chainmail as if it were silk. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Taking a single step back, only one, and keeping his body upright, Galad let the strike pass. His sword flew up to intercept the counter stroke he knew would come when the first missed entirely. The blades met when Ser Harras swung again at his head. Dragon-wrought metal rasped against castle-forged steel, and the sound was like iron carving through wood, harsh and wrong and unlike anything he had ever heard in battle. Three more passes followed as Ser Harras pressed the attack.

Going high again, then feinting a thrust through the visor before dropping low, trying to catch him at the hamstrings. Galad parried each blow without moving from his spot, his sword moving as easily as if it were part of his arm. And it was. In the void, he was one with the blade, one with the air through which it moved, one with the man attacking him. His movements were clean and economical. He moved no more than needed, expending no wasted motion.

Ser Harras circled before him, striking again and again, high and low, aiming for gaps in the greaves and groin and neck. Galad deflected the strikes with quick flicks of his wrist, one foot pivoting on the cobbles while the other remained planted like the root of an oak. The man could not move him. In that moment, deep in the oneness, Galad imagined all those warriors behind Harras—the dozens of Ironborn men watching from the circle—coming at him once their commander fell. Perhaps they would go back on their word.

They might rush at him in numbers, try to drown him in a sea of bodies and steel. He knew, however, that it would not work. He would stand, and they would break against him. He would cut each down as they came. Like flies they would buzz around him, but they would not touch him. And if dozens could not touch him, Ser Harras Harlaw could not either, though the knight did not know it. Roaring something wordless, Harras committed.

Nightfall came down in a tremendous overhand stroke with the full weight of the man's body behind it, aimed to split him in half if it struck true. Galad's sword rose before him, held upright while Harras' blade came down perpendicular. His thin blade, if half an inch out of place, would miss Nightfall entirely and the knight would shear through him. But he could not miss. In the void, Galad could feel Nightfall as if it were part of himself, could sense its position in space as clearly as his own limbs.

Gently, almost lovingly, his blade touched the Valyrian steel sword and guided it around him as it descended, the metals kissing each other like lovers. Air hissed as the dragonsteel passed near his ear, close enough he felt the wind of its passage. In the follow-through, Galad struck. A quick thrust at the unbalanced Harras, and the flesh of the man's right thigh parted in a thick gash, blood welling dark against the mail.

The knight cried out and lurched back, his right leg stumbling under his weight, barely catching himself before going down. Standing where he had been standing since the duel began, Galad did not advance. Harras dragged his weight onto his left leg opposite him, straightening himself. His breathing had changed, heavier now, the controlled ease of before replaced by something effortful. He stood and looked across the distance between them, and in that look something had shifted.

Dropping his eyes to his own sword, Galad saw what he had felt throughout the entire exchange. Along the blade's edge, in several places, small notches had appeared, tiny curved gouges where Nightfall had brushed against the castle-forged steel, each one no bigger than a thumbnail but deep and clean as if cut by a chisel.

In the course of a duel in which he had not blocked a single blow directly, always angling and deflecting rather than meeting force with force, the Valyrian steel had still bitten through his blade in passing as easily as a knife through candle wax. An interesting thing to observe. A dangerous one. If the duel continued much longer, his sword would not survive it. One strike, properly placed, might shear through the blade entirely rather than simply notching it.

"You are good, reachman." Ser Harras spoke through a tight jaw, pain evident in the clipped words. Galad looked at him. The man was hurting, blood running down his leg to pool in his boot, but beneath his helm another expression showed itself. Resignation. The knight knew it, then. Knew the gulf between them, and knew that despite his powerful sword, it could not be bridged.

"You will not yield, ser?" Galad tried once more. Ser Harras let out a short, brittle sound that might have been a laugh.

"I am a Harlaw," he said, as though this required no further elaboration. A pause, and then his voice dropped slightly, losing some of its formality.

"I ask only that you honor your word as a knight." Another pause, and the man glanced down at Nightfall, its dark steel gleaming.

"And the blade. It is my uncle's. I beg that you see it returned to him." Galad nodded.

"I will." Then, with a mighty roar that echoed across the walls of his castle, the Knight of Grey Garden charged forward, and Galadedrid Damodred, to honor the man's bravery in the face of defeat and death, met him in the middle with his own charge.

To those watching around them, it must have seemed a spectacle—two knights trading blow after blow, dragonsteel singing against its ordinary counterpart, both men ducking and weaving and swinging and slashing with all their skill, the ring of the blades coming fast enough that individual strikes were difficult to follow. The crowd pressed closer, men shouting, some calling encouragement while others simply watched in stunned silence. It lasted no more than half a minute.

Galad let it continue as far as his sword could take it. In the void, he was one with the blade, felt every impact as Valyrian steel scored it, gouged it deeper with each pass. His weapon was dying, piece by piece, and he knew it would not be long before it broke entirely. Then, only then, did he end it. He moved. Truly moved, for the first time in the fight.

Stepping inside the man's guard as fast as lightning, close enough to see Harras' eyes widen, close enough to see the knight gain the sudden and complete understanding of exactly how wide the gulf had always been, how carefully it had been concealed from him until this moment. He honored that recognition by making it quick. A double strike. One cut to the wounded leg to bring the man down.

The next at the neck, at a gap no other swordsman would have been able to find through the half-plate and mail, threading the needle in the space between helm and gorget. Then it was over. Blood sprayed red and thick across the grimy cobbles of Grey Garden as its master fell. The body hit the stones with a heavy sound, armor clanging against the courtyard floor. Gasps spread across the crowd. The Reachmen, far outnumbering the Ironborn, did not even cheer at first.

Most stood stunned as the duel reached its end, a contest that had seemed so hard-fought, so closely matched between the knights, they could not fathom how it had ended so abruptly. Only when the swords and axes and maces fell from Ironborn hands, when the dozens of veterans who had come with their knight stripped off their helms and fell to their knees in surrender, only then did the men of the Reach scream out in victory. Fists thrust into the air. Men rushed forward to carry Galad on their shoulders.

He barely had time to snatch up Nightfall from where it had fallen beside Harras' body before hands lifted him. Mors took one of his legs on his shoulder, while a man-at-arms he did not know positioned himself beneath the other. Then he was rising above a sea of Reachmen, borne aloft on their triumph. Cries of "Ser Galad! Ser Galad! Ser Galad!" filled his ears until the sound became a roar without meaning.

The less excitable men, the more sensible ones, moved to secure the prisoners, directing the Ironborn to lay down their weapons and gathering them in groups. A few minutes later, a harried Ser Arys Oakheart shouldered his way through the crowd even as Galad tried to wave the men off, to be set down. The young knight's face was flushed, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.

"Ser!" Arys called up.

"Ser! It's Ser Owen." Still sitting above the crowd, Galad turned toward him. He had not released the void quite yet. There would be a price to pay for delving so deep into it for so long, and he would not pay that price while surrounded by men, even if they were supposed to be his own.

"What of him?" Galad asked.

"I saw him riding away with his retinue just now." Arys gestured toward the gates.

"He'll be riding to Ten Towers. He'll want to be the one to inform Lord Mace of the victory here." A pause, something careful in the young man's voice.

"I fear he will try to diminish your part in it while covering himself in glory, ser." The crowd had quieted around them to hear, and hearing it, voices rose immediately, men swearing up and down that every lord and knight and serving girl in the Reach would hear the truth of what happened at Grey Garden, men pledging their own testimony, men saying things about Ser Owen Inchfield's character and parentage that Galad chose not to repeat.

A flicker of something almost like humor moved through him and was gone before it could take hold. It did not surprise him. Owen would do exactly what Arys described, and he would do it comfortably and with conviction, because men like Owen Inchfield believed very sincerely in the justice of their own perspective. Here, surrounded by the men who had witnessed everything, Owen would not dare try anything.

Yet in the halls he knew, among the lords and knights who knew his name and his family and owed him the natural deference of long familiarity, he would tell his version and it would be received as a version worth receiving. But that was elsewhere. That was later.

"Let him do as he pleases," Galad said, pitching his voice to carry. The crowd settled to hear him.

"The men here have earned their victory with the blood of many of our companions." Grim nods moved through the group. A few men looked at the ground.

"In the morning, we will march out and join Lord Mace at Ten Towers. But tonight we shall rest, and we shall celebrate, and we shall honor our dead." He paused, looking across the faces below him.

"I expect every man here to honor my offer to Ser Harras. No harm shall befall those who have surrendered, and no harm shall come to the smallfolk of these lands. That is my will." They set him down shortly after that, and he was quick to put order to things before the celebration could take on a shape of its own. Neral was the right man for it, steady and trusted by the men-at-arms and possessed of a capacity for good humor Galad had come to rely on.

He sent him into the keep with a group of trusted men to see that his instructions were carried out before anyone else had the chance to make them difficult to enforce. He would not go back on his word. He had given it to a man who was dead now partly because he had trusted it, and that weight was not something Galad would set down. He would see that the smallfolk who worked the lands around Grey Garden did not become victims of wild Reachmen drunk with victory.

They found plenty of food and mead inside the castle that night. The men feasted and drank and made merry in the courtyard as the grey afternoon gave way to a grey evening and then to a dark and cloud-covered night. A few had to be spoken to sharply before the night was out. Only a few. Galad left the rest of it in Neral's hands, and Ser Arys's, and retired to one of the guest rooms in the keep as the sounds of celebration drifted up through the stone floors below him.

The room was small but clean, a narrow bed against one wall and a simple nightstand beside it. Propping Nightfall carefully on the nightstand, the moonstone in its pommel catching the last grey light from the window, Galad finally allowed himself to sit on the edge of the bed. Then he laid back against the thin mattress and let go. The void released him like a dam breaking. All the fatigue and pain he had held at bay came crashing into him like a tidewave. His muscles screamed. His bones ached.

The cuts and bruises he had accumulated over the past day made themselves known all at once, each one demanding attention. But worse than the physical pain was everything else. The faces of the men who had died under his command. Mycah with the arrow through his throat. Lorne with his skull caved in by a horse's hoof. Ser Willam Wythers and his knights burning alive in the farmhouse. Ser Manfryd crushed beneath a stone.

All the nameless men-at-arms who had followed his orders and paid for it with their lives, all the young Ironborn boys he'd cut down as a scythe through wheat. And now Ser Harras Harlaw, an honorable man who had died because he would not yield. Galad closed his eyes and saw them all. In his previous life, he had led men into battle. He had commanded the Children of the Light and the armies of Andor and then of the whole Westlands against the Seanchan.

He had sent men to their deaths in service of what he believed was right. But it did not make this easier. It never did. Outside, he could hear the sounds of celebration, men laughing, singing, drinking to their victory. Inside this small room, Galad lay alone in the darkness and let himself feel the weight of what he had done. Tomorrow he would rise and march to Ten Towers. Tomorrow he would face whatever consequences Ser Owen's tale-spinning brought.

Tomorrow he would return Nightfall to House Harlaw and honor his word to a dead knight. But tonight, he would simply endure.